The topic shifting methods for social chatbots aim to keep users engaged in the conversations on whatever topics that serve the purpose, but are not intended to guide the conversation to any pre-set target.
CIR, however, is performed by goal-directed conversations. Depending on different categories of information seek tasks, the target topic of a conversation can be quite specific (e.g., in information lookup tasks), or relatively vague (e.g., in information exploration tasks). Thus, a CIR system is expected to predict what topic a user might be interested in based on user profile and conversation history, and intentionally guide the conversation to the target. This is the topic we will discuss next, following closely the discussion in [1]}.
